THROUGH THE VEIL: Ambient Landscapes by Nicholas Harper
Through the Veil represents a departure from Nicholas Harper’s signature long neck enigmas and presents a new body of work that focuses on the landscape. For Harper this transition is an obvious one considering his deep love of the outdoors and its infinite potential for arresting ones soul.

For Harper, the natural landscape offers more than beauty and awe. It’s a vehicle for communing with the Creator and harmonizing one’s self with the Creative Principle, that spark that resides in all of us and ignites life and inspiration and calls us to participate in the act of creation.

Drawing on the traditions of Turner and Romanticism, Harper seeks to carve out a niche in the lexicon of landscape painting that is not so far afield of his noir beauties yet distant enough to be of themselves, something totally new for him, standing alone of their own merit.

Conceived from real places and genuine vistas, each painting drips from reality and melts into a state of ambient otherworldliness. The viewer can find comfort in the grounded nod to realism while allowing themselves to fall freely into a meditative realm occupied by wonder and reverie.

The rich darkness that typifies each painting hints at Harper’s well developed and characteristic artistic sensibilities and his desire to go beyond subject matter. Each painting draws the viewer close while enticing you to enter a realm beyond that of this world. It is as if each piece documents a specific portal where the earthly and the divine embrace; each painting an invitation to see through the veil that separates the two.

“I will of course continue to paint portraits. But just as my style of portraiture has changed and evolved and taken on many different facets throughout the past 20 years, so to this body of work is an extension of my creative pursuits. It’s a body of work I wish to continue to visit and expand upon. I think it’s important for me to continually challenge myself, to continually evolve and be reborn artistically so to speak. I think of the portraits and the landscapes as different but equal, as though they are different notes in an evolving symphony.”

“Through portraiture my aim is to use symbolism and allegory as a means of connecting the viewer with their inner spark as a form of communication with the creator, the source or what have you. I suppose it’s a round about way of tapping into universal truth. I think of my landscapes as more of a direct line to God if you will, no wasting time with allegory or narrative. It’s just pure divinity in a frame.”